S haring A ncient W isdom S : Digital Publication of Mediaeval Greek and Arabic Gnomologia

1. Sharing Ancient WisdomS: Digital Publication of Mediaeval Greek and Arabic Gnomologia Mark Hedges, Anna Jordanous, Charlotte Roueché, Charlotte Tupman King’s College London, UK eTraces Workshop, Leipzig, 8th May 2012

2. The SAWS project • International team funded by the HERA programme: Cultural Dynamics: Inheritance and Identity. • King’s College London (Dept.of Digital Humanities and Centre for e-Research) • Charlotte Roueché, Charlotte Tupman (DDH) • Mark Hedges, Anna Jordanous, Stuart Dunn (CeRch) • Newman Institute, Uppsala • Denis Searby and team • University of Vienna • Stephan Procházka and Elvira Wakelnig and team

3. Aims and Motivations

4. Aims of the SAWS project • To exploit digital technologies in order to understand and publish anthologies of “citations” • To focus on Greek and Arabic collections of ‘wise sayings’, gnomologia, from the 9th – 12th centuries • To investigate such‘gnomic’ sayings, moral and philosophical, in Greek and Arabic • To build a framework and set of tools which others can use after us

5. What are gnomologia? • A tradition of “wisdom literature” widely circulated in the antique Mediterranean and medieval period • Anthologies of extracts from larger texts, containing wise or useful sayings, created as practical response to the cost and inaccessibility of full texts . • We are focusing on manuscripts collecting moral or social advice, or philosophical ideas • In particular, we are looking at Greek and Arabic collections from the 9th – 12th Centuries

6. Challenges for digital publication • Traditional approaches to digital publication are shaped: • By the form and scale of the codex • By the concept of the “original text”. • This material suggests/requires a different model: • Interrelated texts of equal (in some respects) merit. • Scale is broader (extended network of relationships): • But also concerned with smaller units of content

7. Some examples

8. Cod. Vat. Gr. 743 f. 11vGnomologium Vaticanum * * Underlining represents the small lines, perhaps coloured, that appears above names.

10. GV 87  Ὁ αὐτὸς ἐρωτηθεὶς τίνα μᾶλλον ἀγαπᾷ, Φίλιππον ἢ Ἀριστοτέλην, εἶπεν· “ὁμοίως ἀμφοτέρους· ὁ μὲν γάρ μοι τὸ ζῆν ἐχαρίσατο, ὁ δὲ τὸ καλῶς ζῆν ἐπαίδευσεν.” Alexander, asked whom he loved more, Philip or Aristotle, said: ”Both equally, for one gave me the gift of life, the other taught me to live the virtuous life. Plutarch, Life of Alexander8.4.1 Ἀριστοτέλην δὲ θαυμάζων ἐν ἀρχῇ καὶ ἀγαπῶν οὐχ ἧττον, ὡς αὐτὸς ἔλεγε, τοῦ πατρός, ὡς δι' ἐκεῖνον μὲν ζῶν, διὰ τοῦτον δὲ καλῶς ζῶν ... Alexander admired Aristotle at the start and loved him no less, as he himself said, than his own father, since he had life through his father but the virtuous life through Aristotle … Diogenes Laertius 5.19, Life of Aristotle Tῶν γονέων τοὺς παιδεύσαντας ἐντιμοτέρους εἶναι τῶν μόνον γεννησάντων· τοὺς μὲν γὰρ τὸ ζῆν, τοὺς δὲ τὸ καλῶς ζῆν παρασχέσθαι. Aristotle said that educators are more to be honored than mere begetters, for the latter offer life but the former offer the good life. Pythagoras? He said: Fathers are the cause of life, but philosophers are the cause of the good life. Selections from the Sayings of the Four Philosophers: (B) Pythagoras saying 18 (ed. Gutas)

11. Information Structures

12. Basic units of analysis are: • a “collection instance”, that is a particular physical occurrence of a collection in a manuscript • A “snippet”, as indicated by a scribe in one particular manuscript • Thus different physical manuscripts imply: • different “collection instances” and • different snippets (even if they are textually identical) • All further relationships will be based around this unit • Each unit will be given a unique identifier (i.e. a URI) • We are recording all identified relationships and will then decide which ones we want to express

13. Relationships – some examples • Between manuscripts: • isRelatedTo • isSameScriptoriumAs • isDerivedFrom • isBySameScribeAs • Between compilation instances: • isBySameScribeAs • isApographOf • isTranslationOf • hasSameStructureAs • http://purl.org/saws/ontology • http://www.essepuntato.it/lode/owlapi/http://purl.org/saws/ontology • Between snippets: • isVerbatimOf • isVariantOf • isShorterVersionOf • isLongerVersionOf • isCloseTranslationOf • isLooseTranslationOf • isCloseRenderingOf • IsLooseRenderingOf

14. TEI XML • TEI is now standard for encoding texts and creating editions • embed meaning within the transcribed text • ensure interoperability with other projects • RDF (Resource Description Framework) • To express the relationships within and between texts and other entities.

16. Using RDFa we can define our links within the XML: <seg type="narrative" xml:id="Th_n13"> <rdg rel="isCloseTranslationOf"resource="Th_tr_s13" resp="Elvira Wakelnig"/> :وقيل له </seg> Each ‘snippet’ has its own URI (generated from xml:id) Relationships and entities are defined in an ontology, which develops as our work progresses.

17. TEI document …. <seg> … </seg> … TEI document …. <seg> … </seg> … <seg> … </seg> … isVariantWordChoiceOf RDFa TEI document …. <seg> … </seg> … Is TranslationOf RDFa RDFa not browsed directly. Extracted into triplestore using XSLT.

18. Observations • Number of analogous mss is very large! • Not just creating digital editions of some mss, but rather the kernel of a larger interconnected corpus • Research value of relationships will increase dramatically with the size of the corpus • We are creating a framework for others to use and extend • Creating a community, not just some editions • A growing network of interconnected information

19. Infrastructure and Tools

20. ms (TEI) ms (TEI) ms (TEI) snip snip snip snip snip Triples Editing tools Annotation tools query/browse visualisation Users add relationships Users edit new texts

21. Text-Text-Link-Editor(TTLE) Thomas Selig, Marc W. Küster

22. TTLE: Aims Assist TextGrid and TEXTvre users to generate arbitrary links between fragments of XML documents of different provenance Manually Semi-automatically Play with other TG components + print Validate existing links between documents Links represent user-defined concepts Citations, allusions etc. Export links in different forms: TEI, RDF, topic maps

23. How might TTLE look?

24. Summary Producing digital editions of some neglected texts. Identifying a network of relationships between texts. Developing a framework and tools to allow others to build on our work. Creating a community not (just) a corpus Use this network of information to investigate flow of knowledge across time, geography and cultures

25. Thank you! Sharing Ancient WisdomS mark.hedges@kcl.ac.uk Aristotle tutoring Alexander (13th century manuscript)